Speedshow Series S2E1: 49 minutes

Speedshow Series S1E12: 49 minutes
Installation by Timna Lugstein and Denitza Zafirova
Opening: Thu 19.09.2024, 18h
20.09. – 06.10.2024 | Schauraum Angewandte | Free entry

The first episode of season 2 of the Speedshow Series presents “49 minutes”, an installation by Timna Lugstein (b. 2000 Vienna, Austria) and Denitza Zafirova (b. 1997 Sofia, Bulgaria), in which the duo attempts to materialize the role that distance plays in their creative and emotional connection. Timna Lugstein studies fine arts in the photography department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Denitza Zafirova studied at Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York and now lives and works in Paris. The Speedshow Series is an exhibition format of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, curated at the Digitale Kunst Department / UBERMORGEN. In cooperation with MuseumsQuartier.
For a child scared by the forces of nature, counting the seconds between lightning and thunder as a calming process, might be the first experience of connecting space and time (“so much time in between! it must be far away…”). As it counts, an imaginary thread unfolds between the child and the monster, the later the thunder, the longer the air line thread. And even as you get older, the apparent revelation of physical laws can bring a reassuring order to the chaos of a thunderstorm.
Vienna and Paris are 1033.49km apart. If a sound is sent from Paris to Vienna, imagining an even surface with no obstacles, it will reach Vienna in exactly 49 minutes, and vice versa. 12 recordings of real life situations, taped on a cassette recorder and sent back and forth between Paris and Vienna, allow the other person to hear the ‘thunder’ of something that has already happened. Every 49 minutes they start playing, triggered by a flash (an actual camera flash, germ. Blitz/bulg. светкавица means both flash and lightning) in the exhibition room. A photographic series captures a performance, inspired by keeping up with the many new versions of self each naturally adopts with the passage of time, enhanced by jobs, studies, relationships, etc.
As an artistic duo and friends, Lugstein and Zafirova began a relationship in 2019 in Paris, which went through a change at the end of that year by the move of Lugstein to Vienna. They have since encountered the difficulties of, on the most surface level, missing each other, on a logistic one – attempting to create together while apart.
The project was also developed devoted to the first thought (the lightning), and a project resulting from it (the thunder). The apparent “time in-between” – a time that is filled with waiting, letting something rest, unconsciously grooming something; an empty time and space, which really is not at all empty, but indispensable for a creative process.